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Displacement in Iray only works on vertices. It is not like 3Delight displacement.
Thank you kindly :-)
It appears I am too stupid to know when to leave well alone, as I will prove:
I have been playing with modelling up a bridge inspired by the Leshan bridge shown earlier. The modelling stage isn't finished - I need to start the longer covered walkway between the gazebos on each side of the main Arch, and do the tile rooves for the four gazebos already modelled. But it's far enough on to see whether it might be of interest. The bridge has steps over the steep part of the arch. The piers extend 10 meters below the waterline shown. The bridge deck width is 780 cm.
The coarse poly count shown is 95k, and it's apparent it needs a good few more. Yesterday I got 880k facets for half the model with a high accuracy export setting. I may have to play about a fair bit to get a reasonable mix of poly count versus accuracy. As it is, with a single material and no tex maps, it renders like a dream.
Distant view:
Along the bridge:
Regards,
Richard.
That's pretty awesome!
Thinking about it, it may be easier on DS if, once I'm done, I cut the bridge into quarters and import 25% into DS, then play with instances to create the other three quarters. That'd keep the poly count within reasonable bounds if it gets totally out of hand trying to keep the curves smooth. It would also make the tex mapping quicker. Mostly. The road deck would have to have a seamless edge at the middle which might not be that easy to get looking right. Hmm will have to think on this.
Regards,
Richard
I have had an interesting time creating filigree tracery to use on the bridge, and added another pair of walkway rooves. I think I have worked out how to model the roof tiles. Will have to try it out soon. Need to add some more on the ends of the central walkways, then I'll be ready to start converting it to DS.
In some ways, this makes me long for the elegant simplicity of a Cable Stayed Suspension Bridge. Never thought I'd say that...
Regards,
Richard.
Nice :-)
That looks absolutely gorgeous so far. I'm excited to see it finished and definitely something I would use in my artwork.
Thank you both very kindly for your comments, they are appreciated.
At the moment I feel totally at a loss as what to do for the ends. Can't really leave them with a straight sliced off end. I did notice that the main road deck is virtually the same height as Andrey Pestryacov's Nature Ravine, so that works fairly well for the edge of the river (provided the ravine is widened a lot), but maybe I need to model up a bit of road running parallel to the ravine and/or a section acting as a viaduct extension to the bridge. And then how to cope with different end heights. The viaduct could be useful here if I put in a few shearing morphs, allowing it to go in a slope up or down. Then, the river bed and silted up patches need to be done. That would be an adventure, as I have never really modelled a landscape, and I'd be learning as I do it. As I said, I'm not entirely sure quite what to do for these bits. Any suggestions would be very welcome.
Regards, Richard
I liked the little bridge. This one appears huge. Not sure I'd want to tackle that. And it does look nice too. The textures will be fun I think. I've been doing some textures (at Rendo) . If There is any that you might need, I can try doing them, not sure if I'd get it right, but I'll give it a shot.
Does look nice though.
Regards,
Bronze Dragon
Yeah, texturing is going to be a challenge. I think the bridge is around the 280m (920ft) length mark. I may be wrong, as I'm not on my modelling machine to check, but it's in that order of size. It seems a pretty nice size to set up a USXT landscape for with a height map. I think I could cope with just doing a hight map for an imagined landscape like that. Just need to check if GIMP can export 16bit monochrome png's, because I know my preferred image editor (Paintshop Pro 5 from a CD on the front of the 'PCPlus' magazine in the year 2000) can't. An 8 bit monochrome png would be awful, giving steps of about 50cm for a 125m altitude range.
I may well have to take some of the seamless CC0 textures on PolyHaven and tile them into bigger textures. Then do editing to try to remove some of the more obvious repeats and put on dirt and staining in the right places etc etc. I'll try to avoid textures more than 16k pixels wide Well, 8k or less will be the target as I think PSP5 has a relatively small size limit too. May have to write my own program to stitch images together in the way I want if PSP5 can't do it, as I don't know enough about GIMP to be able to do it there, and my patience with GIMP's smart alec way of doing things is very limited. I will have to do some calculations of block sizes vs pixel sizes and the like. As the sides of the bridge are mostly going to be seen from a distance, there doesn't have to be too much detail, certainly not on the central arch... unless someone wants an image from a boat. Doh. Will have to think on it.
I suspect texturing the bridge is going to test my minimal photo editing skills to beyond breaking point, but we'll see. I might learn something other than the most likely lesson of 'Don't try this again.'.
Regards,
Richard
It looks like it would also work really well with Terra Dome 3 and its wounded land add-on.
For items like that one - even if it ends abruptly I will disappear it somewhat into the side of whatever scenery I chose to use and then use some primitive planes as well as good shaders to blend the rest with the landscape. For the most part, doing that and clever use of camera positioning will blend it together to make it look like it belongs. If you don't wish to make an entire landscape setting for that bridge, giving it a little more road to each end and slanting it downwards a little would help blend it into the ground a little more so that people can then continue the path further on without the need for blending skillsets and useful tools such as mesh grabber and it's addons.
on a semi-related topic....back when I first started photomanipulation (in my teenage years) paint shop pro 5 was the program I used. I used it up until I was forced to upgrade when windows 7 came out and would no longer support my psp5 program. Of course, this made me an oddball in the photomanipulation and digital painting world for quite a while. I still use paint shop pro to this day...but now I am on the most current one. I've never been a huge fan of photoshop or gimp.
I shall probably try to create end viaducts with slope morphs, it will make fitting it in a scene rather easier.
I'm surprised you couldn't get PSP5 to work on Win7, that's the version of Windows I'm using. Wonder if your installation package was a 16 bit program. That could cause it to fail. It's one of the reasons why we started to change to 3D CAD at work - our AutoCAD LT installation files refused to work on the new version of Windows when we upgraded the machines.
It looks brilliant - I can't wait until you release that one! In the meantime, I had a play with this latest one and I quite like the darker color.
Oh goodness, you have SO MUCH going on. I know what you mean. Some day I will retire and make 3D art all day. 20 years seems so far away though...
Thanks for the kind words. I'm happy with how this one came out. That bridge is clearly the best item in the picture. And it's the only free one!
Looks like VanishingPoint made some alternative taextures for the arch bridge.
Did you mean Winterbrose?
"Arch Bridge in-TOON Style for Daz Studio by Winterbrose"
!!?
Never had that happen before. I suppose I should feel flattered. Would have felt flattered had they taken the trouble to mention it to me.
Regards,
Richard
Ya ya. Winterbrose.
Been working on the roof tiles for the bigger bridge over the weekend. Beginning to see repeating elements in my sleep. The interlocking tiles are created by cutting the form of one tile length valley into a solid block, then arraying the cut in both directions and finally cut to the shape of the section of roofing it's intended for. The underside remains flat to simulate sarking board that's visible to a pedestrian along the walkway. The open ends of the tiles are only cut 3"/75mm into the edge of the roof. Seems to work quite well, but is very slow to do. Will confess SolidWorks struggled with the model size for some of the parts. A complex SolidWorks model is up to 5Mb from my experience of creating literally thousands of engineering parts over the last 16 years. The roof segments were coming out at 21-25Mb. I have only ever once exceeded 25Mb, with a 45Mb file and that was for a very complex roto-moulded polythene tub.
I am going to have to make use of instances in the model when I get it through to DS - otherwise I suspect when the bridge is textured, DS will just curl up & die. At the moment, on coarse resolution, and it's unfinished with the Gazebo lantern rooves yet to be tiled, I'm getting 1.78million triangles. However, with no textures or texture mapping, DS isn't struggling to render it at all, and my GTX 1060 took about 6 minutes for the longer of the two images below to render - which is about 40 minutes less than the first promo image of the arch bridge at the beginning of this thread.
On a really extreme model, I have imported a full spacecraft container model into DS, 11 million facets, and that crippled thePC's performance - though I have since upgraded memory to 24Gb from 16Gb which could improve things.
Further things to do:
Regards,
Richard
Hay! Your Arch Bridge made the Featured Free Stuff section on this night's Renderosity newsletter :-)
Here are a couple of images with the new bridge nearly complete. I need to finish start the model of the dragons on the ridge of the long walkway sections. Then it'll be time to leave SolidWorks behind and start the texturing and optimisation. The model in the images has 4.3 million triangles (wanted to see how it'd look at extreme detail and test how DS would work). It still works well, even with a character for scale at 4000 pixel image width. Quite pleased.
Regards,
Richard.
That is just so cool :-)
Means, really nifty, I like that ... yes, it's from the time of the hippies ;-)
Richard.